The point intercept frequency method is an objective method for estimating abundance of plants.Number of hits between plants and a pin lowered down through the vegetation are counted.

Estimating point intercepts in vegetation can be a tedious job. Therefore we did a study where we estimated accuracy lost when reducing the number of pins per plot. Our conclusion was that for a meadow of 30 plots we could reduce number of pins from 100 pins per 50x50 cm2 to less than 10, without loosing accuracy. This opens up for allocating time saved at analyzing more plots or other communities.

As long as growth forms are considered separately, point intercepts correlates very well with biomass.

Ravolainen et al 2010